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Maybe the issue is that you are too talented / experienced / demanding to look for a job in this thread? Most offers here come from small startups or teams that

by snicky 2y ago

Maybe the issue is that you are too talented / experienced / demanding to look for a job in this thread? Most offers here come from small startups or teams that are unable to pay $500/h or 1M in TC. FWIW I've been hired three times by companies I found in these threads and spent more than seven years with them. Though I'm not a 10x developer by any means and keep my expectations at an average level too.

swozey 2y ago
Most companies don't need anywhere near my level of dist experience and I'm totally aware of that. I'm at an AWS-using company now so it's all basic terraform and CI work but previously I built a literal AWS/Google Cloud kubernetes competitor for a CDN so I dealt with the actual backend of k8s a lot which nobody but CDNs really need. CRIO/Containerd/virtio secure container sort of stuff. Cgroup manipulation at the lowest syscall levels. I'm not pedigreed though. I can't get hired at Google/FAANG because I'm not good enough at compsci/programming to pass any of their coding/committee interviews. I really thought I'd find my way into G, interviewed there with many referrals, etc, but they have no interest. And now I don't even want to go there. My dream companies have dropped to a handful, like Pixar, Nvidia, Arm types. But I don't have the CS. "Get better at programming" .. yeah.. I need to. So I'm in this weird spot where my salary is basically stuck. I'm at around 17 years of experience (I turned 40 today but have worked on bsd/linux since a kid) so who knows what the next 20+ years will look like. Maybe I'm pricing myself out of work. Senior SRE work at this level seems to be 180-250 and you're lucky to get anywhere near that 250 unless you work at FAANG/Datadog/blahblah. Datadogs one of the highest paying SRE groups I'm aware of, but non-remote.
- jp-x-g 2y ago
  It may be useful in times like these to contemplate the impermanence and randomless of the world we live in. The original job I had was "welder", for which the lower end of the pay range was about $20-$30k, and after some additional decades of experience you could dream of rising to $40-$50k. I have had some pretty dumb programming jobs, but on the whole it seems pretty fortunate for there to be a job where you can be a college dropout and outearn dentists (or, for that matter, fleet admirals in the US Navy).
  - swozey 2y ago
    Absolutely. I'm a high school dropout making multiples of 6 figures... Never know how long it will last, eh?

by snicky 2y ago

swozey 2y ago

Most companies don't need anywhere near my level of dist experience and I'm totally aware of that. I'm at an AWS-using company now so it's all basic terraform and CI work but previously I built a literal AWS/Google Cloud kubernetes competitor for a CDN so I dealt with the actual backend of k8s a lot which nobody but CDNs really need. CRIO/Containerd/virtio secure container sort of stuff. Cgroup manipulation at the lowest syscall levels. I'm not pedigreed though. I can't get hired at Google/FAANG because I'm not good enough at compsci/programming to pass any of their coding/committee interviews. I really thought I'd find my way into G, interviewed there with many referrals, etc, but they have no interest. And now I don't even want to go there. My dream companies have dropped to a handful, like Pixar, Nvidia, Arm types. But I don't have the CS. "Get better at programming" .. yeah.. I need to. So I'm in this weird spot where my salary is basically stuck. I'm at around 17 years of experience (I turned 40 today but have worked on bsd/linux since a kid) so who knows what the next 20+ years will look like. Maybe I'm pricing myself out of work. Senior SRE work at this level seems to be 180-250 and you're lucky to get anywhere near that 250 unless you work at FAANG/Datadog/blahblah. Datadogs one of the highest paying SRE groups I'm aware of, but non-remote.

jp-x-g 2y ago
It may be useful in times like these to contemplate the impermanence and randomless of the world we live in. The original job I had was "welder", for which the lower end of the pay range was about $20-$30k, and after some additional decades of experience you could dream of rising to $40-$50k. I have had some pretty dumb programming jobs, but on the whole it seems pretty fortunate for there to be a job where you can be a college dropout and outearn dentists (or, for that matter, fleet admirals in the US Navy).
- swozey 2y ago
  Absolutely. I'm a high school dropout making multiples of 6 figures... Never know how long it will last, eh?